Firefox 3 Release Notes

v3.0, released June 17, 2008
Check out what’s new, the known issues and frequently asked questions about the latest version of Firefox. As always, you’re encouraged to tell us what you think, either using this feedback form or by filing a bug in Bugzilla.

One-click site info: Click the site favicon in the location bar to
see who owns the site and to check if your connection is protected
from eavesdropping. Identity verification is prominently displayed
and easier to understand. When a site uses Extended Validation (EV)
SSL certificates, the site favicon button will turn green and show
the name of the company you're connected to. (Try it here!)

Malware Protection: malware protection warns users when they arrive
at sites which are known to install viruses, spyware, trojans or other
malware. (Try it here!)

New Web Forgery Protection page: the content of pages suspected as
web forgeries is no longer shown. (Try it here!)

New SSL error pages: clearer and stricter error pages are used when
Firefox encounters an invalid SSL certificate. (Try it here!)

Add-ons and Plugin version check: Firefox now automatically checks
add-on and plugin versions and will disable older, insecure versions.

Secure add-on updates: to improve add-on update security, add-ons
that provide updates in an insecure manner will be disabled.

Easier password management: an information bar replaces the old
password dialog so you can now save passwords after a successful login.

Simplified add-on installation: the add-ons whitelist has been removed
making it possible to install extensions from third-party sites in fewer
clicks.

New Download Manager: the revised download manager makes it much
easier to locate downloaded files, and you can see and search on the
name of the website where a file came from. Your active downloads and
time remaining are always shown in the status bar as your files download.

Resumable downloading: users can now resume downloads after
restarting the browser or resetting your network connection.

Full page zoom: from the View menu and via keyboard shortcuts, the
new zooming feature lets you zoom in and out of entire pages, scaling the
layout, text and images, or optionally only the text size. Your settings
will be remembered whenever you return to the site.

Podcasts and Videocasts can be associated with your media playback tools.

Tab scrolling and quickmenu: tabs are easier to locate with the new
tab scrolling and tab quickmenu.

Save what you were doing: Firefox will prompt users to save tabs on
exit.

Optimized Open in Tabs behavior: opening a folder of bookmarks in
tabs now appends the new tabs rather than overwriting.

Location and Search bar size can now be customized with a simple
resizer item.

Integration with Windows: Firefox now has improved Windows icons, and uses
native user interface widgets in the browser and in web forms.

Integration with the Mac: the new Firefox theme makes toolbars, icons, and
other user interface elements look like a native OS X application.
Firefox also uses OS X widgets and supports Growl for notifications
of completed downloads and available updates. A combined back and forward
control make it even easier to move between web pages.

Integration with Linux: Firefox's default icons, buttons, and menu
styles now use the native GTK theme.

More Personal

Star button: quickly add bookmarks from the location bar with a
single click; a second click lets you file and tag them.

Tags: associate keywords with your bookmarks to sort them by
topic.

Smart Location Bar: type in all or part of the title, tag or
address of a page to see a list of matches from your history and bookmarks;
a new display makes it easier to scan through the matching results and find
that page you're looking for. Results are returned according to their
a combination of frequency, and recency of visits to that page, ensuring that
you're seeing the most relevant matches. An adaptive learning algorithm further
tunes the results to your patterns!

Library: view, organize and search through your bookmarks, tags and browsing
history using the new Library window. Create or restore full backups of this
data whenever with a few clicks.

Smart Bookmark Folders: quickly access your most visited bookmarks from the
toolbar, or recently bookmarked and tagged pages from the bookmark menu. Create
your own Smart Bookmark Folders by saving a search query in the Library.

Web-based protocol handlers: web applications, such as your favorite
webmail provider, can now be used instead of desktop applications for handling
mailto: links from other sites. Similar support is available for other
protocols (Web applications will have to first enable this by registering as
handlers with Firefox).

Download & Install Add-ons: the Add-ons Manager (Tools > Add-ons) can
now be used to download and install a Firefox customization from the thousands
of Add-ons available from our community
add-ons website. When you first open the Add-ons Manager, a list of
recommended Add-ons is shown.

Easy to use Download Actions: a new Applications preferences pane
provides a better UI for configuring handlers for various file types and
protocol schemes.

Improved Platform for Developers

New graphics and font handling: new graphics and text rendering
architectures in Gecko 1.9 provides rendering improvements in CSS, SVG as well
as improved display of fonts with ligatures and complex scripts.

Color management: (set gfx.color_management.enabled on in
about:config and restart the browser to enable.) Firefox can now adjust images
with embedded color profiles.

Offline support: enables web applications to provide offline
functionality (website authors must add support for offline browsing to their
site for this feature to be available to users).

Speed: improvements to our JavaScript engine as well as profile guided
optimizations have resulted in continued improvements in performance.
Compared to Firefox 2, web applications like Google Mail and Zoho Office
run twice as fast in Firefox 3, and the popular
SunSpider test from Apple shows improvements over previous releases.

Memory usage: Several new technologies work together to reduce the amount
of memory used by Firefox 3 over a web browsing session.
Memory cycles are broken and collected by an automated cycle collector, a new
memory allocator reduces fragmentation, hundreds of leaks have been fixed, and
caching strategies have been tuned.

Reliability: A user's bookmarks, history, cookies, and preferences
are now stored in a transactionally secure database format which will prevent
data loss even if their system crashes.

System Requirements

Downloading

Mozilla provides Firefox 3 for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X in a
variety of languages. You can get the latest version
of Firefox 3 here. For builds for other systems and languages not
provided by Mozilla.org, see the Contributed Builds section at the end of this document.

Installing

Please note that installing Firefox 3 will overwrite your
existing installation of Firefox. You won’t lose any of your bookmarks or
browsing history, but some of your extensions and other add-ons might not work
until updates for them are made available.

Uninstalling

You can remove Firefox 3 through the Control Panel in the
Start Menu on Windows, by removing the Firefox application on
OS X, or by removing the firefox folder on Linux.

Removing Firefox 3 won’t remove your bookmarks, web browsing history,
extensions or other add-ons. This data is stored in your profile
folder, which is located in one of the following locations depending on
your operating system:

Windows Vista

Users\<UserName>\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox

Windows 2000, XP, Server 2003

Documents and Settings\<UserName>\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox

Mac OS X

~/Library/Application Support/Firefox

Linux and Unix systems

~/.mozilla/firefox

Any version of Firefox that you install after removing Firefox 3 will
continue to use the data from this profile folder.

Extensions and Themes

Extensions installed under Firefox 2 may be incompatible and/or require updates to work with
Firefox 3. Please report any issues to the maintainer of the extension.
When you install Firefox 3 all of your Extensions and Themes will be
disabled until Firefox 3 determines that either a) they are compatible
with the Firefox 3 release or b) there are newer versions available that
are compatible.

Known Issues

This list covers some of the known problems with Firefox 3. Please read
this before reporting any new bugs.

All Systems

Installing Firefox 2 in the same directory in which Firefox 3 has been installed
may result in Firefox 2 being unstable (bug 423226)

If Flash content is active when Firefox crashes, the Crash Reporter may not
activate (bug 422308)

Deleting an entry from the history sidebar, then invoking the Clear Private Data
tool can result Firefox crashing (bug 426275)

The IME input tool used to enter Japanese, Korean, Chinese and Indic characters
is covered by the "Add Bookmark" panel. Users can use IME for input in the Library
window by selecting "Organize Bookmarks..." from the Bookmarks menu (bug 433340)

Some add-ons that depend on deprecated code may not install properly (see
bug 406807)

A Windows Media Player (WMP) plugin is not provided with Windows Vista and some
other versions of Windows. To view Windows Media content, you must install this
plugin by following these
instructions. After installing you may need to check for Windows Updates
before the plugin will show content properly.

Japanese, Korean, Chinese and Indic characters can not be entered (using IME)
into text fields in Flash objects (bug 357670)

If you are using IPv6 from a network location that doesn't support IPv6 routing
your DNS lookups may be very slow. Set network.dns.disableIPv6 to
true as a workaround (bug 417689)

Items in the "File" menu show as inactive after using the "Print" item from
that menu - switching to a new tab restores them (bug 425844)

At this time, Firefox 3 cannot be used when the user profile is stored on an
AFP directory (bug 417037)

Linux and Unix

Users on a PPP connection (dialup or DSL) may find that Firefox always starts
in "Offline" mode. Toggle File > Work Offline as a work around (bug 424626)

Users running Ubuntu 7.10 may need to update their certificate databases in
order to submit crash reports (bug 407748 for
instructions)

The mouse button assignments for Back and Forward have changed, users may
need to reconfigure their pointing devices (bug 420294)

Incompatibilities between NVIDIA drivers and some versions of the X server
cause scaled images to render incorrectly (bug 411831)

The Orca screen reading software does not read some text, such as the save
password notification, site identity information, or the default prompt text
in search fields - these are known problems with Orca (see Gnome bug 533109
and 533125)

Troubleshooting

Poorly designed or incompatible extensions can cause problems with your browser, including make it crash, slow down page display, etc. If you encounter strange problems relating to parts of the browser no longer working, the browser not starting, windows with strange or distorted appearance, degraded performance, etc, you may be suffering from Extension or Theme trouble.
Restart the browser in Safe Mode. On Windows, start using the "Safe Mode" shortcut created in your
Start menu or by running firefox.exe -safe-mode. On Linux,
start with ./firefox -safe-mode and on Mac OS X, run:

cd /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/
./firefox-bin -safe-mode

When started in Safe Mode all extensions are disabled and the Default theme is used. Disable the Extension/Theme that is causing trouble and then start normally.

If you uninstall an extension that is installed with your user profile (i.e.
you installed it from a Web page) and then wish to install it for all user profiles
using the -install-global-extension command line flag, you must restart the
browser once to cleanse the profile extensions datasource of traces of that
extension before installing with the switch. If you do not do this you may end
up with a jammed entry in the Extensions list and will be unable to install
the extension globally.

If you encounter strange problems relating to bookmarks, downloads, window
placement, toolbars, history, or other settings, it is recommended that you try
creating a new profile and attempting to reproduce the problem before filing
bugs. Create a new profile by running Firefox with the -P command line
argument, choose the "Manage Profiles" button and then choose "Create
Profile...". Migrate your settings files (Bookmarks, Saved Passwords, etc) over
one by one, checking each time to see if the problems resurface. If you do
find a particular profile data file is causing a problem, file a bug and attach
the file.

Frequently Asked Questions

What can I do to help?

We need help from developers and the testing community to provide as much
feedback as possible to make Firefox even better. Please read these notes and
the bug filing instructions
before reporting any bugs to Bugzilla. You can
also give us your feedback through this feedback form.

Why haven’t you responded to the mail I sent you?

Use the newsgroup. The Firefox team reads it regularly, and your email may have gotten lost.

Lots of people. See Help->About Mozilla Firefox, Credits for a list of some of the people who have contributed to Firefox 3.

Where’s the Firefox 3 source code?

A tarball of the Firefox 3 source code is available for download.
The latest development code can be obtained by cvs.
Firefox-specific source is in "mozilla/browser", "mozilla/toolkit",
and "mozilla/chrome". Please follow the build instructions.

Where is the mail client?

Firefox 3 works with whatever mail client is the default on your system.
However, we recommend Mozilla Thunderbird, our
next-generation email client and the perfect complement to Firefox.

Contributed Builds

These are unofficial builds and may be configured differently than the official
Mozilla builds. They may also be optimized and/or tested for specific
platforms. You can browse through the available contributed builds on the
FTP
site.